Pip: Ability to do pip editable install on read-only filesystem

[cancan101]

Repost from SO.

Make it possible to do an editable pip install from a directory located on read-only filesystem.

Right now setup tools is trying to write an egg file into the source directory:

$ pip install -e /tf/stuff/
Obtaining file:///tf/stuff
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    running egg_info
    writing requirements to src/stuff.egg-info/requires.txt
    error: [Errno 30] Read-only file system: 'src/stuff.egg-info/requires.txt'

    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tf/stuff/

The docs say:

For local projects, the "SomeProject.egg-info" directory is created relative to the project path. This is one advantage over just using setup.py develop, which creates the "egg-info" directly relative the current working directory.

[pfmoore]

If it's a read-only filesystem, how is it editable anyway? Why not just do pip install <directory> to install the project into site-packages? The -e flag doesn't gain you anything if you're not editing the files in-place...

[cancan101]

The file system is editable from _elsewhere_ and I want to use those changes.

[dstufft]

I'm going to close this, the way that editable installs work this is more or less unavoidable at this time and I don't believe that the use case is widespread enough to spend volunteer time devising a new system to support it so keeping an issue open is not something I think is beneficial.

[smheidrich]

This would be useful for when you want to run tests in a container (e.g. Docker) which mounts your project directory from the host system. If nothing was written to the project directory by pip, you wouldn't have to set the user id in the container to match that of the project directory's owner, and you would be able to mount the directory in read-only mode.

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

@smheidrich editable install as implemented by current tooling is unable to provide even basis for this ^^ so benefit is irrelevant there isn't even a baseline to support this

[lock[bot]]

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.